Sir John Mortimer: one of Britain's greatest life-enhancers

Sir John Mortimer, as remembered by The Daily Telegraph theatre critic Charles
Spencer.

Sir John Mortimer has died.Photo: STEFFAN HILL

By Charles Spencer

8:01PM GMT 16 Jan 2009

"I am disappointed by that stroke of death, which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure."

So wrote Dr Johnson on the death of the actor David Garrick, and his words precisely summed up my own feelings and thoughts when I heard yesterday that Sir John Mortimer had died.

Mortimer was one of Britain's greatest life-enhancers, and one of its greatest lunchers too. In Horace Rumpole, the cunning, good-hearted Old Bailey hack with cigar ash on his cardigan and a prodigious thirst for Chateau Thames Embankment, he created a fictional character who I suspect will outlive his creator by decades and even centuries. Rumpole is every bit as distinctive and beloved as Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster.

But if Mortimer himself reminded me of anyone, it was of another Sir John, Shakespeare's Falstaff. There was something larger than life about this barrister, playwright, screenwriter and novelist who possessed an apparently insatiable appetite for talk, drink, women and gossip.

No one but a severely afflicted myopic could describe Mortimer as a good-looking man, but his ability to get pretty young women into bed was legendary. He always said that the secret was to make them laugh. It was rare that one saw him without a glass of champagne close to hand, and his girth in his middle years spoke of a man who ate not wisely but too well.

I got to know him during the last few years of his life. I reviewed one of his novels in which he set a scene in a game-keeper's hut which he had described burning down in the previous book. I pointed out the error, in that pernickety way critics have, and received a delightfully self-mocking card from him pleading Alzheimer's. Then we sat next to each other at a theatrical awards lunch, and John said we should have a return date at the club to which we both belonged, the Garrick (on which he closely modelled the Sheridan Club in the Rumpole stories).

The lunches became an eagerly anticipated regular fixture. By then Sir John was in a wheelchair, and hardly ate a thing. A couple of oysters and a few sips of soup were all he could manage. "No, I don't eat any more!" he would announce with amazing good cheer, and although he would order both champagne and half a bottle of Chablis he rarely finished them. I always felt guilty when it was his turn to pay as he had consumed so little.

What hadn't diminished was his relish for conversation. He was one of the best talkers I have ever met, and his anecdotes, often involving a whiff of scandal and sex, plus impersonations of ancient judges, were among the most entertaining I have ever heard.

But he was a good listener, too. He always wanted to hear the latest theatre gossip, and to learn which new plays were good and, more especially, which ones were stinkers. And he loved it when his own superb autobiographical play, A Voyage Round My Father (1970) , received a wonderful revival at the Donmar Warehouse a couple of years ago and then transferred to the West End, with Sir Derek Jacobi playing Mortimer's blind barrister father and Dominic Rowan playing the young John.

In fact, John never quite escaped the influence of his remarkable dad, and wrote about this eccentric, irascible man who refused to acknowledge, let alone give in to, his own blindness almost obsessively. In his later years, he returned to live in the house that his father built in the Chiltern Hills near Henley, and from childhood he inherited his father's passionate love of Shakespeare. If conversation ever flagged - and it very rarely did during our lunches - he would fill the gap by quoting yards of the Bard.

But there was a serious side to John, too, though this least pompous of men did his best to conceal it. He was a passionate defender of the principle of human liberty, and appeared in many famous obscenity cases such as the Sex Pistols and Oz trials, when the powers-that-be were seeking to curb freedom of expression. He also defended dissidents in trouble with foreign governments.

And having given him a knighthood in 1998, Tony Blair's Government discovered it had totally failed to either get him on side or shut him up. He was withering in his attacks on New Labour's erosion of personal liberties like fox hunting, and when they banned smoking in public places, he actually took up smoking small cigars again as a personal protest.

What I will always remember best about John Mortimer is his warmth, his wit and his determination to wring every last drop of pleasure out of life, even when he was old and frail. The man who delighted in growing old disgracefully was actually a superb example to us all.